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1996-04-30 - Re: The Joy of Java

Header Data

From: Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>
To: perry@piermont.com
Message Hash: ae8e14370899cdf4f8310c795fd8bb8f9b445452e39e10e3d8beab030aeaa89c
Message ID: <199604292229.SAA08088@universe.digex.net>
Reply To: <199604270123.VAA01708@jekyll.piermont.com>
UTC Datetime: 1996-04-30 07:29:41 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 15:29:41 +0800

Raw message

From: Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 15:29:41 +0800
To: perry@piermont.com
Subject: Re: The Joy of Java
In-Reply-To: <199604270123.VAA01708@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <199604292229.SAA08088@universe.digex.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


"Perry E. Metzger" writes:
>You can do that safely without making it dangerous for your machine. I
>know how I would build a restricted execution environment for such
>markets. However, Java is 1) too slow, since if you are selling
>rendering cycles or such you don't want to be running an interpreter,
>2) insufficently safe, and 3) paradoxically, insufficiently powerful
>for the sort of code you would want to run in such an environment.

The speed can be significantly addressed by compiling the byte-code to
local machine instructions, but given the sheer number of junk cycles
that are made available by letting a Java interpreter sell them, it
doesn't much matter for some applications.

I agree that Java is currently too unsafe.  The current Java model may
not even be salvageable (that being where I got in on this thread).
It's the concept embodied by Java (and it's many conceptual cousins,
Scheme, Safe-TCL, E, etc.) that I was talking about.

I don't understand what you mean by "insufficiently powerful".  It's as
expressively powerful as most high-level languages, and computationally
Turing equivalent.  It's lack of power seems entirely in the performance
arena, which may be solved, eventually.

Thread